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WEDNESDAY, June 24, 2015 – Parkinson's disease patients who begin regular exercise earlier have a much slower decline in quality of life than those who start exercising later, a new study finds. National Parkinson Foundation (NPF) researchers looked at information from nearly 3,000 patients. More than 1,300 reported doing little regular exercise before taking part in the study. Over two years, 500 of the inactive patients began to exercise more than 2.5 hours a week. The researchers compared patients who exercised regularly for the entire two years to people who were inactive at the start of the study, but then began a regular exercise routine. The study didn't note the type of workouts, just the total amount of exercise. After two years, scores on a questionnaire that measured the impact of Parkinson's on daily life in a number of areas – including mood, movement and social ... Read more

TUESDAY, April 28, 2015 – Kirk Gibson, who played 17 seasons of Major League Baseball and is perhaps best known for a dramatic pinch-hit, ninth inning home run to win a World Series game in 1988, said Tuesday he has Parkinson's disease. Gibson, 57, a Michigan native who played 12 seasons with the Detroit Tigers, said in a statement that "I have faced many different obstacles in my life, and have always maintained a strong belief that no matter the circumstances, I could overcome those obstacles. "While this diagnosis poses a new kind of challenge for me, I intend to stay true to my beliefs," he added. "With the support of my family and friends, I will meet this challenge with the same determination and unwavering intensity that I have displayed in all of my endeavors in life. I look forward to being back at the ballpark as soon as possible." According to the U.S. National Institutes of ... Read more

MONDAY, Oct. 20, 2014 – Drugs commonly used to treat Parkinson's disease may raise the risk of so-called impulse control disorders, according to a new review. These disorders include compulsive gambling, compulsive shopping and/or hypersexuality. That increased risk was seen in a fresh review of a decade's worth of U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) records. "What we have here is a striking example of a major problem in drug safety," said study author Thomas Moore, a senior scientist with the Institute of Safe Medication Practices and a lecturer in epidemiology and biostatistics at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C. "And that is the issue of how drugs can sometimes provoke psychiatric side effects that actually make people behave in extremely destructive and abnormal ways." Moore and his colleagues reported their findings online Oct. 20 in the journal JAMA Internal ... Read more

TUESDAY, March 29 – Parkinson's disease drugs called dopamine agonists appear to cause impulse control problems in almost one-quarter of patients, says a new study. Previous research has linked dopamine agonists, which include Mirapex (pramipexole) and Requip (ropinirole), to impulse control disorders, such as gambling addiction and hypersexuality, and to compulsive behaviors, such as binge eating, overspending and excessive computer use. In this study, Mayo Clinic researchers analyzed Parkinson's disease patient records over two years. "What we found was that as many as 22 percent of patients during that two-year period had a new-onset impulse control disorder," lead investigator and neurology fellow Dr. Anhar Hassan said in a Mayo Clinic news release. The higher the dose of dopamine agonist, the more likely a patient was to develop an impulse control disorder, the researchers found. ... Read more

MONDAY, May 10 – Medicines used to treat Parkinson's disease may increase the risk of impulse control disorders, such as problem gambling, compulsive shopping and binge eating, researchers warn. In a new study that included 3,090 patients being treated for Parkinson's at 46 movement disorder centers in the United States and Canada, the researchers found that 13.6 percent of the patients had impulse control disorders. These impulse disorders included gambling (5 percent), compulsive sexual behavior (3.5 percent), compulsive shopping (5.7 percent) and binge eating (4.3 percent), and nearly 4 percent of the patients had two or more of these disorders. Impulse control disorders were more common among patients taking dopamine agonist medications (17.1 percent) than in those not taking the drugs (6.9 percent), the study authors found. Other factors associated with impulse control disorders ... Read more

WEDNESDAY, Jan. 13 – Reduced dosages of dopamine agonists, drugs routinely used to treat Parkinson's disease, can cause symptoms similar to those experienced by addicts in withdrawal, such as anxiety, panic attacks, pain, dizziness and drug cravings, researchers say. The symptoms of what the researchers have dubbed "dopamine agonist withdrawal syndrome" have been linked to a disruption in levels of dopamine in the brain, according to the study published in the Jan. 12 issue of the Archives of Neurology. "Like cocaine and methamphetamines, dopamine agonists work by stimulating the reward pathways in the brain," senior study author Dr. Melissa J. Nirenberg, said in a news release from Weill Cornell Medical Center. "For this reason, it makes sense that they would engender similar withdrawal symptoms, particularly in those with high cumulative drug exposure," explained Nirenberg, associate ... Read more